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Creating and Using Oracle® Solaris Kernel Zones

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Updated: December 2018
 
 

Working in the Kernel Zone Environment

Working in a kernel zone environment is very similar to working in a global zone. This section describes the major differences between the kernel zone administrative environment and working with a global zone.

Process ID Visibility in Zones

Kernel zone processes are not directly visible to the kernel zone host system. You must use the zlogin command followed by a process management command to view any process information about a kernel zone. For example, to see process information about syslogd on the kernel zone kzone1 from the kernel zone host system global:

global$ zlogin kzone1 ps -ef |grep syslogd
 root  1520     1   0 20:23:08 ?           0:00 /usr/sbin/syslogd

Duplicate Process IDs in Kernel Zones

The global zone and each kernel zone manage their own process ID space. The same numeric process ID might identify different system processes in the global zone and in one or more kernel zones. For example, on the same system, you can have the numeric process 5678 running syslogd on the global zone and running sendmail on a kernel zone.

To kill process 5678 with the ps command in kzone1, use the zlogin command followed by the kill command.

global$ zlogin kzone1 kill 5678

Kernel Zone Zonepath

A kernel zone's zonepath, by design, cannot be set. It contains no persistent or otherwise serviceable data.

Resource Management Functionality in Kernel Zones

Resource controls such as max-processes are not available when configuring a kernel zone. Because a kernel zone has an independent kernel from the global zone, a process running inside a kernel zone cannot take up a process table slot in the global zone.